


The Crimes of Lockhart: 20 Years Later

by elijah_was_a_prophet



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Epistolary, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:14:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22777765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elijah_was_a_prophet/pseuds/elijah_was_a_prophet
Summary: by Rhea Greengrass
Comments: 17
Kudos: 33
Collections: Worldbuilding Exchange 2020





	The Crimes of Lockhart: 20 Years Later

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fencesit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fencesit/gifts).



**Part One: Inauspicious Beginnings:**

Like many persons of note, the man known as Gilderoy Lockhart came from humble beginnings. Born in 1964 to a Muggle and a witch, he was the only child in his family with magic (his two older sisters were Squibs), and his mother’s darling. Neighbors of the Wakefield-based family reported being subject to hours-long conversations in which Mrs. Lockhart bored them with stories about everything from her young son’s exemplary good looks and charm to his stellar performance in the school play as third shrub from the left. Unsurprisingly he gained a significant ego from these experiences, an ego which he carried with him to Hogwarts.

“I have never met a student both so impressed with his own abilities, and yet so lacking in them,” says former Hogwarts Headmistress Minerva McGonagall. “If Gilderoy had put half the effort into actually working that he did in pretending to work he might have made something of himself.”

Put into Ravenclaw, his cleverness was thrown into confidence tricks and sleights of hand. He tormented fellow students with Muggle card tricks and shell games in exchange for Knuts, sold counterfeit Spell-Rite and Memerize quills for Sickles, and made over 100 Galleons off a betting pool for the Central Asian Quidditch League- a league which didn’t exist until 1993. Academically his grades were quite poor- History of Magic Professor Cuthbert Binns commented in his 1978 midterm report “Student cannot remember basic facts about Wizarding history” and “Student once identified “Proog” as the capital of “Chekoslovakiya””. 

Potions Master Horace Slughorn had similarly negative feedback to give. When asked in a 1989 interview about Lockhart’s recent book _Year With The Yeti_ he had this to say:

_“Nice words, yes, very nice words. He isn’t a bad writer. And he’s quite charming. I invited him to several meetings of the Slug Club, at least until the incident with the Pepperup Potion and poor Marcus Findlay, who was allergic to cayenne. After that he was allowed to be charming from a distance.”_

Lockhart received a minor disciplinary action in 1977 for sending himself 800 valentines, delaying class for an hour while the school staff attempted to wrangle such a large number of birds, and a major disciplinary action for carving his name into the Quidditch field. In 1979 caretaker Argus Filch attempted to impose three major disciplinary actions upon Lockhart for his creation and use of a spell that caused enormous images of his face to appear on ceilings and in the sky. This motion was rescinded by Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, on the grounds that merely being irritating and self-obsessed was not a crime.

Such accounts of youthful indiscretion may seem irrelevant, but they all build towards a greater truth, that is to say the true crimes of Lockhart and the inciting incidents of this article. Lockhart was no small-time charlatan or petty thief; Lockhart was a legendary manipulator who abused his ability with the Memory Charm and his force of personality to both ruin lives and dishonestly gain literary fame and recognition. 

There was one piece of complex magic Lockhart could do, and that was the Memory Charm. His were practically perfect in execution, able to block specific memories from entire villages worth of people. When used in conjunction with a false memory spell, he could make entire events disappear from oral history. This is where he got his magical tales of adventure and action- the minds of innocent victims, conned so thoroughly that even they believed Lockhart had accomplished their deeds. 

That is the crime of Gilderoy Lockhart. And now, 30 years after the publication of his first book, comes the truth. 

**Part Two: Lost in Memory**

1983’s _Break With A Banshee_ was an insignificant entry into a year that included modern classics such as _Chronicle of the Wise Seer_ by Margarita Komarova and _I Come Into My Own: The Love Affairs of Artemisia Gentileschi ,_ but as an introduction into Lockhart’s methodology and style it is invaluable. Concerning his supposed banishment of a banshee, the book is riddled with numerous factual errors and misinformation. “Chappelle-in-ley-Fifth” is not a real town, and the creature he calls a banshee more closely resembles a Nigheag Bheag a Bhroin, or Night Washerwoman. 

These inconsistencies are more easily explained if one knows the source of his story- an oral account given by Chapel-en-le-Frith resident Margaret Joyce, confirmed in 2015 when she visited a Healer at St. Mungo's complaining of chronic headaches and vertigo. Even the most delicate Memory Charms leave microtears in the structure of the brain itself, and using an Imaging Spell the Healer was able to spot these defects and repair them, leading to a fuzzy recollection on Joyce’s part of the affected memory. Further investigation revealed that almost 65% of Chapel-en-le-Frith residents had neuron damage consistent with that seen in widespread Memory Charm usage. 

Imaging Spells were also able to confirm that Ejvind Sandemose, Danish author and magizoologist, had not had his memories from the summer of 1983 erased by nissen. Instead a chance encounter with Lockhart had resulted in said memories being stolen, with the side effect of delaying his graduate thesis publication by almost a year. 

_“I <expletive> hate that <expletive><expletive>. I was so <expletive> close to getting my doctorate, and then he takes four <expletive> months of research right from my head. Tell him that if I see him alive I’m going to <expletive> <expletive> <extremely expletive>.” _

The memories stole from Sandemose became the basis of 1984’s _Travels with Trolls_ . It was at this point that the British literary establishment began to take note of Lockhart, mostly through snide reviews critiquing his overwrought prose and lack of credibility. Literary merit doesn’t correlate with popularity, however, and _Travels with Trolls_ became a bestseller for its depiction of daring romance alongside troll battles in the wild Danish countryside. While the romance was a fabrication, the troll hunting methods described were accurate enough, and Lockhart was invited to speak at the Wimbledon Ladies College.This gave him an in on creating a veneer of reputability. 

Using the funds gained from his stint as a bestselling author Lockhart set out on a six month tour of Eastern and Central Europe. His choice of destination was intentional- communication across the Iron Curtain was poor, and an abundance of rural villages meant he could steal memories of incidents few people remembered. In 2017 an independent effort was launched to find these victims, but the over 30 years which had passed since Lockhart’s expedition meant many of them had left their home villages, passed away, or were otherwise untraceable. 

Compounding this issue were Lockhart’s aforementioned issues with factual accuracy and geography. _Holidays with Hags_ and _Voyages with Vampires_ , released as a two-in-one set, contained many of the mistakes one might expect from a man who once called “Proog” the capital of “Chekoslovakiya”. He describes Sofia as a landlocked city of little importance, attempts to speak Finnish in Estonia, and claims that Alexander the Great was from Malta and not Macedonia. The only accurate information in the book is copied directly from Evpraksiya Nikolova’s 1977 book _Confronting Baba Yaga,_ incorrectly attributed to her husband Vasiliy. Mr. Nikolov is a chef, and even if he had been a magizoologist it would still be incorrect to cite him as “Vasiliy Nikolova”. Getting a fact as basic as gendered surnames wrong shows Lockhart's confidence that his mistakes would not be spotted, or even addressed. 

Czech novelists Helena Láník and Dalibor Myška have also filed against Lockhart, alleging that portions of both _Holidays with Hags_ and _Voyages with Vampires_ were stolen from Láník’s Den of Thieves series and Myška’s Earthbuilders trilogy. As of this writing Lockhart’s lawyers are arguing that translating the series and replacing the protagonist’s name with Lockheart’s own qualifies it as a transformative work. Court date is pending.

The material for Lockhart’s 1986 novella _Wanderings with Werewolves_ was also obtained on this trip, stolen from warlock Hovsep Kasparian as he attempted to enjoy his trip to Minsk. Due to the fact that he was away from home his family still remembered his defeat of a pack of mountain werewolves, and his amnesia regarding the incident was a mystery until, like Joyce, he visited a Healer complaining of vertigo and chronic migraines. The Kasparian family has declined pressing charges, satisfied with having had the mystery of where their patriarch’s memories went solved.

**Part Three: A Continued Reign of Terror**

With the publication of his Eastern European adventures Lockhart had achieved the notoriety and fame he had long coveted. Britain's Dark Force Defense League honored him with a gold-rank membership, and he was given an honorary position as Senior Lecturer of Magizoology at the Nottingham School of Husbandry and Creature Welfare. Lockhart responded by creating a correspondence course for those who wished to gain insight into his skills and experience. Costing seventy-seven Galleons for a six week course, it’s estimated that Lockhart made anywhere between 77,599 and 94,633 Galleons from the first round alone. 

Other Lockhart ventures included a guide to pest control and a cookbook describing the local delicacies he had encountered on his travels. In 1987 he went on another trip abroad, spending his time in a variety of Middle Eastern and Asian locales. His fanclub (membership 20,000) received accounts of these travels in excruciating detail through Lockhart’s weekly newsletter, entitled “Magical Musings”. These musings included Lockhart’s thoughts on people not recognizing him, the deplorable state of his availability in foreign bookstores, and the lack of bangers and mash in Chinese restaurants. 

He returned from this so-called hiatus with another double release, 1988’s _Gadding with Ghouls_ and _Year with the Yeti._ Of these two, the former is the most interesting, due to the presence of outside verification. The book details an encounter in which Lockhart saves a remote Lebanese town from an infestation of ghouls. It was the apparent truthfulness of this account which led to him receiving an Order of Merlin, Third Class, an award meant for common citizens who perform acts of duty above and beyond in aiding the welfare of foreign countries. The town, entirely Muggle, recounted how a blond-haired man had run into the graveyard and come out bloodied but triumphant. Lockhart would later claim he had defeated the ghouls using the “Stalinskaya-Duclair Maneuver”, a method which appears to not exist outside of his writings and correspondence courses. 

It wasn’t until 2015 that the trick behind this was revealed. Lockhart had caught wind of a secret coven which planned to save the Muggles from the ghouls. He waited in the graveyard until the spell was complete, then leaped in and performed a Memory Charm upon the members of the coven. The townspeople assumed he had solved the ghoulish conundrum, and the coven, having no memories of why they were standing naked into a graveyard covered in olive oil, went home puzzled but none the worse for wear. 

_Year with the Yeti_ is the most inaccessible of Lockhart’s canon, being purportedly based upon “dream visions” he had while in Tibet visiting Buddhist monasteries. Long sections of the book are dedicated to translations of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a claim made dubious by the fact that Lockhart appears to neither read nor speak any of the Tibetic languages. Lockhart’s attempts at spirituality read like those of a man who has just realized that other people around him have thoughts. As usual there are factual errors upon factual errors with no attempts at citation or explanation. One might wonder if he ever even made it to Tibet. The only good point to be made about the entire mess is that it appears to have no stolen memories, only Lockhart’s inane ramblings and poorly-drawn recreations of the paintings inside of the monasteries. 

He released no other notable books except for his 1991 memoir _Magical Me,_ the long-windedness of which has not been seen in British literature since _David Copperfield_. It was a bestseller in Britain for 8 weeks, capped off with his ascendancy to a professional position at Hogwarts, the tragic results of which most readers already know. 

**Part Four: Who Will Stand Trial?**

Gilderoy Lockhart, 54, now lives at St. Mungo’s. He has lived there for the past 28 years. In an irony of ironies, he has now been rendered incapable of independent living by a misfired Memory Charm. The incidents which led up to the accident are unknown, but in the Potter Era of Hogwarts almost everyone at the school was in constant peril. Deaths such as those of Cedric Diggory, Bartimaeus Crouch, Albus Dumbledore, and Voldemort overshadowed Lockhart’s brief tenure, and with the post-Potter informational revolution exposing British readers to the flaws of Lockhart’s work (and to better literature) he has faded into relative obscurity. His fan mail has slowed to a trickle of Christmas cards and the occasional request for an interview that is forgotten about the minute it leaves his hands. 

Due to his state of incapacity no one will stand trial for Lockhart’s crimes. The Lockhart estate, maintained by his lawyer, has achieved settlements with the Joyce and Kasparian families. Most of his other victims, however, have been lost to time and age. They will never see justice, their identities locked in the mind of a man who cannot remember his own fame. The world has forgotten Lockhart, and Lockhart has forgotten the world in turn.


End file.
